Uri Norwich

I started recently taking some interest in books related to Jewish themes by the modern writers. What I found out, and rather quickly, there were two broad categories of contemporary Jewish writings: academic studies and, in my view, useless and boring sagas, unrelated to anything. I suppose it is the general direction of most any writings now. What I mean by this--there is no connection to our reality. (There are a few exceptions, of course.)
"Forbes" magazine not long ago profiled an ex-Soviet immigrant's success story what prompted me to take a look at the group of people who arrived from a totalitarian dictatorship and adapted so well to "brutal" capitalist society that they had outdone their peers who were born here and certainly had a head-start. I asked myself: why? I started my research and read numerous academic studies and fictions, until I ran across this unorthodox title "Russian Jews Don’t Cry” by unorthodox author Uri Norwich.
There had been a few novels written in the past years about the wave of Jewish immigration from the USSR in the 70s and 80s, when over one million people had been freed from slavery. However, none of them explored a side this book approached. A traditional story would tell about a “run-of–the-mill” Soviet Jewish immigrant family walked by their hand by an American help organization from the moment they crossed the USSR’s border to the moment they land in America, Australia or Canada. There wasn’t anything extraordinary about those stories, except that by the most part they were sad. People had been simply transferred from point A to point B, hardly realizing what was happening to them, and mostly around them.
Just the opposite, the protagonist of this novel is a happy, young, and full of life kid, who had drawn his lucky ticket and got out of the USSR at the height of raging Cold war. Since the kid was all alone, he had an opportunity to undertake various risks, which a "normal immigrant family" couldn't afford. This is not a sad, traditional immigrant tale, but a happy one. The novel tries to explore some sides of Jewish immigration many authors avoid, or simply do not know about them at all.
Although this novel is not an academic study (genre: realistic fiction), it may shed a different light on understanding psychology and motives behind great success of thousands of Soviet immigrants in their new homeland.
I highly recommend this book. Perhaps, it would be of any interest to you to explore the novel and voice your opinion. Respectfully,
Benjamin Zackind… (más)